The mnemonic: "are their three or two?" is stuck in my head after reading Margaret Schlauch's The Gift of Tongues.(it is from a story she tells with a mother asking her son how many sweets he has left in his hand, as they journey across Europe on a train. ) A tokipona mnemonic would be nice.

A suggestion for the consonants, is to use one of the 5 vowels to voice the consonant-letter name. So we have a 2 letter word for each consonant (and a 1 letter word for each vowel). Instead of using a system like in Esperanto where an "o" is added to the consonant to give the letter name, why not use the AEI (ah-eh-ee) picture as inspiration, to make:

As noted, tp names try to avoid existing official tp words, so this scheme fails that test. But it does work with the hieroglyph system somewhat. I think the naming rules are probably more primary than the ieroglyphs.

I thought about existing words, and from the dictionary could only find a couple. But this is tokipona after all - i don't see any problem calling a 'letter' pi, or a 'phoneme' mu etc.. whilst using pi or mu etc.. for another thing. Surely every word will have more than one meaning in tokipona? I like it! It sounds good, to me. It would be nice to hear any other suggestions for this.

Nothing about letter names in pu or any other that I know of. The hieroglyphs use acronymic keywords ('akesi' for /a/, say -- though any /a/ word, including 'a', would do as well and so on). I assume for the moment that the support word for letters would be 'sitelen' but any noun would cause problems with 'pi' if anything followed, and possibly with 'mu' (and I do have my eye on 'ka' for future use). If you just cycle the vowels you actuall get a better set 'ja, ke, li*, mo, nu, pa, se, ti, wo*' So swap the vowels for /l/ and /w/ to 'lo' and 'wi' and you have a clean set, The vowels still need something , since three of them are words which could turn up after 'sitelen' to some purpose. The /-n/ solution only creates a problem with 'en', which, alas, can definitely come after 'sitelen' and in a spelling situation. But no natural solution is obvious.

Right: i can see now there are nearly one hundred possible syllables in tokipona at the moment (?). So words, and syllables, can end only with a vowel, and -n. Is there really any good reason why the vowel letter-names cannot stand for themselves: a, e, i, o, u ? I know the rules should be followed, if there are going to be any exceptions, however, couldn't we make one for the actual letter-names? The names of the letters are unlike any other tokipona names; and maybe it would not be so confusing, or unnatural to people?

... and, if we can live with one exception* for the consonant names, your suggestion of cycling the vowel endings is an elegant solution:

jakeli*monupasetiwo

We would rarely be naming the alphabet in conversation. Could we live with 'li' being the name of a letter?

Each word is made up from the first word beginning with that letter, a = akesi, so "a" is "ake".Each name has three letters. Vowels made up with the first three: Vowel+consonant+vowel, VCV, combination.Consonants are made up with the first three: Consonant+vowel+consonant, CVC, combination.

I use the first possible word in the word list to form the letter-names, but maybe one of the other words from thelist might be a better choice ( i am thinking yak sounds like a " dirty word",so maybe "jel" is better, and "pak" is a bad word, so maybe "pal" would is better?) ?.